ETHEREUM SMART CONTRACT- ITS VULNERABILITIES AND SECURITIES


As regards crypto currency, an agreement exists between its security and flexibility; as the programmers are provided more freedom on accessing digital ledgers, the system being prone to hacker increases. Ethereum, being the next generation of digital ledger technology allowed the transaction of ether(crypto currency) and has also developed various applications related to smart contract (Grishchenko, Maffei&Schneidewind, 2018). Smart contract comprises the base for accumulating digital assets along with multiple localized applications within the area of the digital ledger. As these smart contracts are popular and unchangeable, they become extremely vulnerable due to the easy coding errors by their programmers. The increase in the security breaches and the constant loss of revenue has compelled the increase in security criteria’s in programming of smart contracts. The prime motive is to help smart contract programmers by presenting an assortment of the familiar security issues, scrutinizing the tools related to security code investigation for identifying the weak points. The weaknesses of the Ethereum environment arise mostly due to the programming languages and their flexible natures, the connotations also pose difficulties for efficient programmers (Grishchenko, Maffei&Schneidewind, 2018).
The localized application security project(DASP) is a project for retrieving the vulnerabilities of smart contract within a secured community. The smart contracts in Ethereum are recorded in solidity which is an improved scripting language structured solely for ethereum (Grishchenko, Maffei&Schneidewind, 2018). Some of the common smart contract vulnerabilities are: integer overflow, reentrancy and denial of service (Grishchenko, Maffei&Schneidewind, 2018). The reentrancy attack has been described as the common ethereum weakness which occurs when the smart contracts record the financial details of series of external entities and helps the programmers to procure funds with the aid of its withdraw function, vicious smart contract can also procure total balance with the aid of withdraw function. Issues related to access control occur in almost every program; service denial is the deadliest vulnerability in the ethereum world- some applications can be recovered by its attack but smart contracts remain permanently offline by its attack (Mavridou, &Laszka, 2017). Commonly called nothing is secret, bad randomness are predictable- block numbers are used by smart contracts as randomness source in playing games. With the help of integer overflow, the hacker manipulated ERC20 contracts and procured abnormal token units; DOS attacks pose threat to smart contracts- in cases related to auction contract, hacker by immediately accessing bid function prevents the users from declaring bids (Mavridou, &Laszka, 2017).
Smart contract can be secured efficiently by following the proposed practices related to languages and platforms; secondly, the threat to security in the smart contracts occur due to errors and viruses in the codes of the sources, thus testing the contract prior to official release becomes vital in securing them (Atzeiet al., 2017). Thirdly, security audit should always be conducted; code errors and common bugs can be identified using the basic testing appliances; however if need arises security testers can also be appointed for helping professionally. The programmer’s main concern should be maintaining security while writing smart contracts since minor error can cause loss of millions of revenue (Atzeiet al., 2017).

REFERENCE:


Atzei, N., Bartoletti, M., &Cimoli, T. (Atzei, N., Bartoletti, M., &Cimoli, T. (2017, April). A survey of attacks on ethereum smart contracts (sok). In International Conference on Principles of
Grishchenko, I., Maffei, M., &Schneidewind, C. (2018, April). A semantic framework for the security analysis of ethereum smart contracts. In International Conference on Principles of Security and Trust (pp. 243-269). Springer, Cham.
Mavridou, A., &Laszka, A. (2017). Designing secure ethereum smart contracts: A finite state machine based approach. arXiv preprint arXiv:1711.09327. https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.09327



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